The UC Way or the Highway

In the past few years, businesses are increasingly focused on two areas: 1) saving money and resources and 2) consolidation and collaboration of operations. Particularly in technology, this consolidation can be witnessed in the jump in virtual desktops and virtual servers, both of which leverage resource sharing and economies of scale to save on space, power and ultimately, cost and complexity. At the same time, we are seeing more and more technologies standardize their protocols and use of network infrastructures.

Unified Communications and Collaboration is the concept of putting both voice and data on a converged line instead of the traditional method of separating phone and computer networks. Placing both voice and data on the same network line requires constant monitoring of that pipe for cases of unexpected interactions between the increased numbers of applications sharing one path. While helping PathView Cloud customers diagnose their networks, we’ve seen a wide variety of network problems; one customer’s VoIP calls had intermittent downtime and dropped calls, but only during the hours of 5-6 PM! With the help of PathView, we detected that the customer’s IP storage was kicking in and backing up computers at 5pm, the standard “end of the work day.” This increased consumption of network bandwidth and the lack of QoS on voice traffic allowed enough packets to drop, resulting in poor voice quality and dropped calls.

AppView Web

We’ve seen how people often assume that the pipe needs to get bigger in order to handle the extra traffic that will be traversing the pipe when Unified Communications are deployed. This is not always the case.

When you have the ability to do application-specific testing, you can see both sides of the pipe in order to help you find the location of the voice quality issues, whether the voice degradation occurs from site a to site b or vice versa. AppView Voice gives you the ability to test devices with real voice packets to verify voice quality between offices or between buildings. This can be done with a specified number of voice calls on the line for a specific amount of time, giving you information such as Mean Opinion Score (MOS), packet loss, jitter and many other performance metrics, which give you insight into how the network is dealing with the extra load on the line. Similarly, it is important to be able to monitor out to a specific website, returning performance information such as DNS resolution time and Connection establishment time, to be able to see exactly what your bandwidth needs on for web-based applications.

AppView Voice

Using PathView Cloud will help you determine whether extra bandwidth is needed or if settings or configuration are to blame for issues (such as setting proper QoS settings on voice packets!). So with the big move to unifying your communications, use PathView to save your sanity and help resolve issues in a much faster and more precise fashion.